“May 16, 2017 – The Women’s Fiction Writers Association (WFWA) today announced the finalists of the second annual Star Award, given to authors of published women’s fiction.Six finalists were chosen in two categories, General and Outstanding Debut.The winners of the Star Award will be announced at the WFWA Retreat in Albuquerque, New Mexico on September 23, 2017.” In the general category, WWK’s Carla Damron was one of three finalist for her novel, The Stone Necklace. Go to Carladamron.com for more information. Congratulations, Carla!

Congratulations to our writers for the following publications:

Warren Bull's new Lincoln mystery, Abraham Lincoln In Court &Campaign has been released. Look for the Kindle version on February 3.

Shari Randall's"Pets" will be included in Chesapeake Crimes: Fur, Feathers, and Felonies anthology, which will be published in 2018. In the same anthology "Rasputin," KM Rockwood's short story, will also bepublished. Her short story "Goldie" will be published in the Busted anthology, which will be released by Level Best Books on April 25th.

In addition, our prolific KM will have the following shorts published as well: "Sight Unseen" in Fish Out of Water, Guppie (SinC) anthology, just released, and "Making Tracks" in Passport to Murder, Bouchercon anthology, October 2017.

Margaret S. Hamilton'sshort story, "Once a Kappa" was published as a finalist in the Southern Writer's Magazine annual short story contest issue. Mysterical-E published her "Double Crust Corpse" in the Fall 2016 issue. "Baby Killer" will appear in the 2017 solar eclipse anthology Day of the Dark to be published this summer prior to the eclipse in August.

James M. Jackson's4th book in the Seamus McCree series, Doubtful Relations, is now available. His novella "Low Tide at Tybee" appears February 7 as part of Lowcountry Crimes: Four Novellas, which is available for order.

Monday, November 14, 2016

Writers Don't Come from Nowhere

by Linda Rodrigez

Receiving honor shawl from Chief of Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma

I’m
a Cherokee poet and novelist who writes about a Cherokee protagonist
and also reviews books, so people send me just about every novel
written that has a major Indigenous character in it. A terrifying
number of them are romances with generic spray-tanned hunks on the
cover, love interests who are half-Cherokee, half-Navajo, half-Sioux,
or just plain half-Indian (these authors don’t seem to know any
other of the 500 tribes exist) and written without the least tiny bit
of knowledge of any of these different cultures.

I
also get contacted repeatedly by people who want me to give them a
crash course in being Cherokee (or even just Native) because they’ve
decided to make the protagonists of their books, or even a whole
series, Cherokee (or just Native). These are people who know nothing
about the Cherokee, not even the most basic information, and
apparently have no Cherokee friends or acquaintances. My attitude
toward them, I’m afraid, is not much more sympathetic than toward
the authors wanting reviews for their books with “Native”
characters. Basically, these folks are saying to me, “I want an
‘exotic Indian’ protagonist and the Cherokee are the most famous
tribe, so I’ll choose them, but I have no real interest in the
culture or knowing anyone in it. I’m too lazy to do any research on
the most documented tribe in American history (the Cherokee were
over 90% literate in their own written language and had a bilingual
newspaper long before the Removal in the 1830s), so please do my
research for me—and maybe I’ll use it or maybe I’ll just do
what I want to do, whether it’s true to the culture or not, while
putting your name down as the ‘expert’ I consulted. Because I
clearly don’t give a real damn.”

Still,
as an editor friend of mine once said, “Writers don’t come from
nowhere.” He’s absolutely correct in saying that, and it speaks
to a constant problem I see with manuscripts. Among other things I do
to make what is laughingly called a living, I screen manuscripts for
several national book contests, evaluate manuscripts for several
university or small presses, and review fellowship application
packets for two artist residencies. One of the problems I constantly
encounter when reading slush pile or contest entries or fellowship
application manuscripts is the writer who seems to come from nowhere
and to exist in no particular space in the world.

Unfortunately,
I read a lot of manuscripts with good technique but no life, and with
no roots, history, or culture to feed them, they’re not likely to
ever develop any. These writers are trying to be universal, I
suppose, but they haven’t learned the lesson that the specific and
particular embody the universal and make it come to life.

Everyone
comes from somewhere. Perhaps from an urban slum, perhaps from a
pristine upscale suburb, perhaps from an up-and-down series of foster
homes, perhaps from great wealth or poverty or anything in between.
Everyone comes from some place, some culture, some family. Somewhere
where people talk and think a certain way and hold certain
expectations. Too many otherwise good manuscripts, however, exist in
limbo, in a cultural vacuum.

I
suspect, in part, this has become so prevalent because writers think
their own backgrounds are not interesting or “exotic” enough. It
seems to me that America has a paradoxical relationship with
difference. We fear and hate the different, the Other, but we
also exoticize it, investing it with greater interest and excitement
than ourselves. These attitudes are actually two sides of the same
coin since exoticizing the Other renders it even more foreign and
Other and thus worthy of fear and hate. The result for writers,
however, is that many writers feel their own backgrounds can never
match the interest of the Other.

One
evening at a lively, crowded Latino Writers Collective event, a young
woman was talking with two of us and the half-Iranian wife of another
member. This young woman lamented that she had no culture to draw on
for her creative work and wished she were Latino or Native American
or Middle Eastern since that would give her cultural richness to
write about.

As
I questioned her, however, I found that her father had come from
Norway as a young child with his parents and her mother’s father
emigrated as an adult from the Ukraine—two places rich with
history, art, culture—but she knew nothing about them, had pretty
much scorned them. I recommended she learn about where and what she
came from instead of wishing she were someone else, someone “exotic.”
These cultures and the upper Midwestern place in which she’d grown
up were her donnée, her given.

Roots
isn’t just a miniseries. Ancestral culture is something we all
have, whether we know it or not. It’s a little easier for those of
us who can’t escape it because of the faces, eyes, and hair in our
mirrors or the names or accents that set us apart from the
mainstream. For us, it becomes one of our obsessions because
difference per se is an obsession with most Americans. And
because, too often, difference equals less than to a
number of Americans. This fact, underlined by radio and television
daily, leaves us scribbling away to try and show that our people, our
cultures, our languages are rich and beautiful and not less than
anyone else’s.

We
all have our own specific roots, though, every one of us. And even if
we’ve fought hard to escape from them, they leave a lasting impact
on us, on the way we use language, and on our worldview. Witness F.
Scott Fitzgerald who returned to the status of the once-poor outsider
futilely trying to enter the ranks of wealthy society and win the
rich girl of his dreams for his greatest work, The Great Gatsby.
If Fitzgerald had tried instead to write from the viewpoint of
someone born to that wealthy stratum of society, think what his novel
would have lost. If we try to whitewash our roots out of existence so
we’ll fit in better with the homogenized culture around us, we’ll
inevitably shortchange our work.

Increasingly
in America, many people pass as homogenized, middle-class,
white/Anglo Americans (though many doing that are not really
Anglo-Saxon, such as my friend of the Norwegian-Ukrainian
background). It’s almost always easier that way—leave behind the
non-Anglo-Saxon background, the poor or working-class background.
Leave behind the chance of ethnic slur (there’s one for just about
every non-English background). Leave behind the chance of
socioeconomic slur (poor white trash, trailer trash, redneck,
anyone?). But I believe the decision to leave our histories behind is
a mistake. When we do this, we rob ourselves of riches we can use to
make our writing come alive.

The
two most powerful aspects of writing that has a unique voice, writing
that comes alive, are detail—the detail that only you would have
noticed and invested with emotion—and obsession. The best writers
write from their obsessions, and obsessions start in childhood and
adolescence. They start back there in our family histories and the
cultures in which we grew up.

I
know. I know. It sounds like the old “write what you know” stuff,
doesn’t it? I don’t mean to set limits, however. If you find
yourself obsessed with some other culture in which you didn’t grow
up—the way John Steinbeck did with the Okies of the Dust Bowl—throw
yourself into that culture. Live with it and learn it. Steinbeck
“imbedded” himself with the Okies as they trekked from Oklahoma
to California and as they tried to live in California. That’s the
way he was able to write The Grapes of Wrath with such
powerful authenticity. Writers who ignore their own roots often try
to write from the viewpoint of someone very different from their own
experience—without bothering to learn much about that community.
When you read their work, you can tell immediately that they have no
real basis in that character’s world. It rings false, and that’s
always a death knell for any writer, whether poet, writer of fiction
or nonfiction.

If
you’re going to write from inside a character from a different
culture, spend real time in that culture with its people. Talk with
them, but more importantly, listen to them. Ask questions. Learn the
culture. I guess it is the old command of “write what you know,”
after all, or rather, what you have taken the time to learn about.

My
advice is to root yourself as a writer. Go back to your own origins.
Mine your memories, seeking those emotion-freighted, telling details
and your own obsessions. Learn about your own history and culture—all
of it if you’re a mix of more than one, as most of us are. Remember
the language and idiom of your earliest family. And if you want to
write about cultures and people foreign to your experience, root
yourselves just as deeply in those also.

Find
your roots as a writer, and I believe you will find your voice. Isn’t
that what we all look for when we read—a unique and distinctive
voice that allows us to see the world in a way that’s slightly
different from the way anyone else does? What’s the old adage about
giving your children roots and wings? Well, give your writing roots,
and you’ll give it a chance to take flight.

Linda Rodriguez's book, Plotting the
Character-Driven Novel, forthcoming Nov. 29, is based on her
popular workshop. Every Family Doubt, her fourth mystery
featuring Cherokee campus police chief, Skeet Bannion, is due in
June, 2017. Her three earlier Skeet novels—Every Hidden Fear,
Every Broken Trust, and Every Last Secret—and
her books of poetry—Skin Hunger
and Heart's Migration—have
received critical recognition and awards, such as Malice
Domestic Best First Novel, International Latino Book Award, Latina
Book Club Best Book of 2014, Midwest Voices & Visions, Elvira
Cordero Cisneros Award, Thorpe Menn Award, and Ragdale and Macondo
fellowships. Her short story, “The Good Neighbor,”
published in the anthology, Kansas City Noir, has been
optioned for film.

16 comments:

Excellent points, Linda. Thank you. For whatever reason, many people don't look back at their own backgrounds and choose to write about something different. Or if they do write about a group of people, they rely on tired stereotypes. I realized that I had done that in a drafted manuscript and made changes, fortunately before anyone else reviewed it.

Ohio is under-represented in fiction, but the small college town I write about is an actual place where I once lived. I know the flora and fauna, the sights, sounds, and smells, and how the seasons change. I know the people who live there, and the facades they build to keep their little world a safe and sane place.

I wrote a short story about New Orleans, a place I'm getting to know more about with each visit, though I hadn't experienced the Red Dress Run in person. I researched the event, its history, food, and music, and interviewed my daughter, who had participated. The characters I created were based on southern women I had known.

Once a woman filled out a form about me for employment. I knew her. She had been married and divorced twice. at that point in my life I was single and had not married. Looking over the form to make any corrections I noticed that under marital status she had written "None."

Sometimes I write about people of color. I have chosen to live and work in place where, as a Caucasian, I was part of a minority.

Warren, so if you weren't married or divorced, you had no status, at all? What about good old "single" or "bachelor"? This is the thing, so many people only view the world through their own self-centered, limited view. Everyone and everything else is Other.

Writing ethnic background is difficult. While my protags are Caucasians, because they live in South Florida they both have ethnic friends. I'm lucky to have long-term friendships in the Latin community that have created a posse to keep me straight. Even then, I get tripped up. In my first book, my protag had a Puerto Rican friend. When I gave the scenes to my friend to vet she called me out--I had used some Cuban, not Puerto Rican references. Subtle, but telling differences.

But see, Kait, you're doing it right. I don't think anyone expects perfection, but we do expect that writers will do their due diligence and try their best to be accurate. I think any writer who wants to write about diverse characters and doesn't have any people from diverse backgrounds in her/his life needs to self-question why her/his life is so segregated and what to do about that first. Most of the time, it's by choice, and that usually means that person has internalized the negative stereotypes about people who aren't from her/his own background. Not a promising beginning.

Congratulations on your award, Linda, and thanks for the reminder that the specific and particulars embody the universal and make it come to life. I especially appreciate the advice that finding our roots will help us find our voices.

My books take place in a fictional town in N.E. Ohio where I've lived all my life. Even though I've visited many places throughout my life, I don't feel I know enough about those places to feel comfortable writing about them

A few years ago a writer who I knew only through Malice and the Guppies, got a contract to write a series for a publisher who publishes lots of cozy mystery series. I was looking forward to reading the book because it took place in an Amish community in Ohio, and I like books with an Amish theme. However, she never visited Holmes County where it supposedly took place with the name changed. I got so upset reading the book because there were very few references to the Amish in there except for a young girl who was breaking away from being Amish. Obviously, she hadn't visited the area or even done any research on it. Especially, when she had a young English teenager come in all excited because he saw this old guy with a beard in a buggy. There is no way anyone living in almost any section of Ohio would not know the guy was Amish or be excited about seeing an Amish person especially in the area the author was writing about.

Yes, Donna, writers who focus on telling details will bring things alive on the page, and voice is almost always a function of who we are in this world and how we react to who we were born in this world.

You've reminded me of Dan Keding's experience working in Alaska. A student complained there was nothing to write about. Then a bear clawed the window . . . "Oh that happens all the time." We don't think what we see is special because we're used to it.

I'm hesitant to stray too far away from things and people I know. I'd like to expand my use of characters from other ethnic groups, but I've read so many cringe-worthy passages about them that I fear I will write something cringe-worthy, too. And I won't even realize it.

And it's not just in writing. Today I was out with a group and someone asked an obviously Chinese man if he were Vietnamese or Korean or what. While sometimes I have difficulty visually identifying people's ethnic background, Chinese and Koreans and Vietnamese people really don't resemble one another much.

Yes, KM. You're right about that. There's a big difference among those three groups. Though I know people who would say, "Well, they all just look Asian to me." Certainly, a big difference between Korean and Vietnamese.